Yeah. I worked infra at a few EU Universities, and while firing someone in that environment is pretty difficult, you still get the "old boys club" that will absolutely not let you do anything.

The problem was never users/faculty. It was other people doing IT there for longer who would not accept anything they were unfamiliar with, and treated "their" hardware as if it was their own children. It led to a sort of balkanization of infrastructure that was extremely difficult to break, and you often had to spend way more of the budget to come up with convoluted solutions so you didn't touch their ancient setups rather than just making the whole thing homogenous and centrally managed.

As a result, depending on what you were working on, you could have to deal with wildly different AWS/Azure/GCP platforms, or on-prem hardware that could range from independent(!) OpenStack installs to ancient Debian machines that might not even be supported anymore. Sometimes people negotiate licensing completely separately, where you could have unused licenses available but it's not communicated so it's bought again by someone else. Some places even had random servers running inside people's offices connected via Wi-Fi.

There's a reason I got out of that line of work. I'm frankly surprised universities aren't a larger target.

it's like pulling teeth because you try to get everyone to agree on every decision. sometimes you just have to tell your academic user base that this is the way it is.

it doesn't have to be that way. IT people are pretty shit in general at soft skills. sometimes, you need to stand up for yourself in a conflict.

your userbases digs in their heels because you let them.

> sometimes, you need to stand up for yourself in a conflict.

Then you just get fired. They’ll just replace you with someone else who’ll listen. Some people just don’t learn no matter how hard you try.

Or the users escalate to a high enough level, who inevitably has a university admin background and has no regard for IT or security - the decision inevitably ends up being on the side of the userbase. This is the problem with being considered a cost center, rather than a value producer within any organization.

Or you can work with people constructively and respect them rather than viewing this as a "conflict" where one needs to assert themselves.